I'm not sure I believe that this was posted by an innocent bystander. Marvin85 appears to have been created for the sole purpose of posting to HN, it's only submission and comment both belong to this thread (although I can't explain how old it is, 220 days). I'll buy that a staff member (tomazstolfa) happened to be watching HN and was able to respond within minutes, but that's dubious, presumably there are more important things for a startup to be doing. My real concern is that the link given here is an invitation link, and not the real homepage of vox.io . I'd assume that normal invitation links only work for a single user, and this one appears to be able to absorb quite a few people, I was able to sign on without any hiccups.

Now there's nothing wrong with plugging yourself on HN, if you've created a useful or interesting service people are glad to pay attention to and, more importantly, discuss you. However misrepresentation is not something that I think I can endorse.

With all that said, I like the idea of vox.io . I think I'm going to stick to my unhappy combination of google voice and skype for now though. vox.io doesn't seem to provide me anything I don't already have except shady marketing techniques.

Well, it's like this. With invitations one receives 0.15€ of credit for every new registered user (similar to some other services, which reward you for bringing in new users). Marvin85 obviously tried to cash in by posting invite link. But I don't see anything terribly wrong with that.

There are no hidden marketing techniques and I am not aware that Marvin85 is in any way connected to our team.

Num1, we were a bit surprised by all the new traffic coming from HN on our Chartbeat dashboard and I followed the link here.

I thought it would be nice to reply and thank a user that posted a link about us.

We have no affiliation with Marvin85 whatsoever.

I can promise you we would never set up something like this on HN - we respect this community and have been following it for a while. We also had planned to post a "Rate my startup" post when ready, but Marvin85 beat us to it.

It may just be me, but I will never try a service that requires me to hook into my email, Facebook or Twitter account. I'm sure you're great guys, but I have been on the receiving end of startups' contact list spam too many times to ever give up that kind of info. It sounds neat though, good luck.

The verification SMS took a long time to arrive and I couldn't find an easy way to get back to the page where the code had to be entered. Could find it using the back button though, but that wasn't really convenient.

Also, more importantly, making calls fails (trying to call my home number in NL) without any message about what went wrong.

We're working on that, but we were caught a bit by surprise here. It will be available shortly. We're also working on google not demanding access to your contacts upon login or registration (although we don't import any contacts automatically -- only on explicit user interaction).

I really like the idea of not having installed software to make this happen. Would be perfect for netbooks or Flash-capable tablets where you don't want to install Skype. Also a great alternative to Google Voice for users not in the US.

A question, though -- At €.12/minute for me in the US to call someone in London, that's nearly 6x the cost of a Skype call. Are there any chances of these rates going down? It's still deadly cheap, to be sure, but price will be a factor.

This is a known issue in the current version of voxio. If you get this message it's most likely that your number is not supported by our system at the moment. This 'misleading' message has been fixed and it will be online very soon. We are working hard to support all possible phone numbers out there.
Thank you for the feedback.

The service does not access your contacts unless you explicitly execute the import. You may choose not to import any contacts and add them by hand.

Also, I find it strange that people are more willing to trust the phone number than the list of contacts (which you can delete, anyway). Unless you store some credit card info in your contacts list, I guess :)